downloading jpg's

[mightymid]

Hi all,

I have a question about making photos available for download from a site.

We have jpg's on our site, and we invite members of the press to download them. However, the only way I know how to enable downloads of files is to provide them in zip format. Is there a better way?

Thanks,
midori

[korkus2000]

Not really. Zip has become the most widely used compression format. It helps save bandwidth and space. I think it is probably your best option for jpgs.

[limbo]

Problem is thee will be a percentage of your audience who will not have a zip software installed.

So you could also encourage users to open the JPG and rightclick to save. Its a bit messy but I have found many users are quite used to this and do it often.

Ta

Limbo

[jomaxx]

Right-clicking is a fairly trivial skill, and hopefully any member of the press would be able to accomplish it if you give them some prompting.

Frankly JPEG images do not print well, and are not the best choice for print journalists. You might also want to include high-res TIFF versions of the images if possible.

Clicking on a TIFF image link has always brought up a download box in the past, although I just tried it now and, God help me, Quicktime has somehow become the default viewer.

[jetboy_70]

Here's something I've not tried, but it may well work:

. Put the download page in directory of its own

. Add an .htaccess file to this directory, changing the MIME-type of jpegs to something made up:

AddType application/x-download-jpeg .jpg

This should make jpegs an unrecognised file type for this directory alone, thus forcing them to be downloaded.

. Make sure there are no jpegs used as graphics on the download page, as the browser will likely attempt to download them when the page is loaded.

Maybe Apache won't allow you to this (assuming you're using Apache) - on the surface it seems a bit of a daft idea. Worth experimenting with though ...

[jetboy_70]

I agree with Jomaxx though. Zipped tiffs would be a far better bet for print.

[Mark_A]

erm ... not strictly true about jpegs not being good for prints, it depends on the amount of compression used in their creation and their size.

My digital camera has 6 and 12 megapixel jpeg output modes. The 6mp mode creates jpeg files of 3014x2016 pixels in the region of 2.5mb size which print on photo lab printers straight from the camera quite finely at 10x15 inches. They look just like the photographs they are :-)

My advice if you wanted to create print ready jpegs rather than much larger filesize formats would be to keep them at a large resolution [to print at a high dpi] and save them at something like 97% jpeg compression .. that will still keep them way smaller than raw, tiff or bmp alternatives, and loose hardly any visual detail, but will make them a good bit friendlier for downloading.

One caveat, while editing and resaving always do it in a non lossey format like tiff or bmp or something, every time you save a jpeg you loose some information so only make the jpeg when you have finished all editing.

hth

[jetboy_70]

Obviously the less compression you use, the better the results will be. However, if you need to alter the levels of jpegs in Photoshop it can really bring out the compression artifacts, particularly on areas of lesser detail. Jpeg can be a real pain to work with if you need to make alterations of this nature.

[Mark_A]

yes .. dont work with them .... work on non lossey formats if any saving is to be done .. to tweak any out of cam jpegs [often shot with no sharpenning] I first convert to bmp - edit - often keeping any created layers in the saved editing file ... last step to save as whatever the output medium is to be ...

Depends as you hint at the level of nth degree of quality the end customer wants and their output needs.